THE GRAVES OF ACADEME

by Richard Mitchell

The
End of the String

AS A SCHOOLBOY, I
always presumed that my teachers were experts in the subjects that they
taught. My physics teacher must, of course, be a physicist, and my history
teacher a historian. I knew that my music teacher was a musician, for
I had actually heard him play, and, during a dismal year in military
school, I could see with my own eyes that the Professor of Military
Science and Tactics was a bird colonel.

Even when I became a schoolteacher myself,
quite by accident, I imagined that I had been chosen for the work because
of my knowledge of the subject I was to teach. It turned out not to
be exactly so, for I was soon asked to teach something else, of which
my knowledge was scanty. No matter, I was told. I could bone up over
the summer. Eventually, I was asked to teach something about which I
knew nothing, nothing at all. Still no matter. I seemed to be a fairly
effective teacher and at least smart enough to stay a lesson or two
ahead of the students. That's just what I did. No one saw anything wrong
with that, and the students never caught me. It was nevertheless depressing,
for it led me to suspect that my physics teacher perhaps hadn't been
a physicist after all.

What then, exactly, was he? What
was it that made a teacher a teacher, if it wasn't, as it obviously
wasn't, an expert knowledge of some subject matter? How could it be
that I was able to teach, to the complete satisfaction of my colleagues
and supervisors, and with no visible detriment to my students,
a subject of which I knew practically nothing at first, and of which,
after a year of teaching it, I knew just about what anyone could know
of it after one year of study? Was there something wrong with
that? Was there something wrong with me that I suspected that there
was something wrong with that?

It took me many years to find answers
to those questions, and, when I did, it wasn't because I was looking
for them. It was because I finally settled in what was called a State
Teachers College. (Like Pikes Peak, it had no apostrophe.) As it happens,
it is no longer a State Teachers College. The legislature later enacted
a long and complicated law which had, as far as I can tell, the sole
effect of removing from that title the word "Teachers." The
college has not changed much, except that where it was once unashamedly
a teachers' college, it is now ashamedly a teachers' college. There
I was, and I couldn't help looking around.

At the end of my first semester, I walked
into a classroom where I was to give a final examination. (We don't
do much of that anymore, since it may just be a violation of someone's
rights.) On the blackboard was the final examination that had just been
given to some other class. Very neatly written it was, too. The last
question--I'll never forget it--was worth fifty-two percent of the grade:
"Draw all the letters of the alphabet, both upper and lower case."
Draw.

There is some truth in the "ivory
tower" notion of academic life. I had spent my whole life in one
school or another, and I was, of course, faintly aware that I was only
faintly aware of what was going on out in the world. When I looked at
that blackboard and imagined all those students dutifully "drawing"
the alphabet in their blue-books, I realized that I didn't even know
what was going on down at the other end of the hall. Nevertheless, it
still didn't occur to me that this astonishing examination had something
to do with those questions that I had long since stopped asking myself.

It turned out, of course, that what I
had seen was a final examination in one of those "education"
courses, about which, at that time, I knew nothing. Well, that's not
quite true: I did know one thing, because earlier that semester I had
looked into a classroom where something amazing was happening. There,
in front of the class, stood an unusually attractive young lady, a student,
tricked out in a fetching bunny outfit--not the kind you're probably
imagining, just a pair of paper ears pinned into her hair and a stunning
puff of absorbent cotton somehow or other tacked on behind and clothes,
too, of course, but I can't recall any details. She was reading aloud,
with expression, and even with an occasional hop, from a large book
spread out flat at about hip level, glancing down at it remarkably infrequently.
Large type. She was doing a practice lesson. I awarded her instantly
an A plus.

So I knew two things about the making
of a teacher. Both seemed engaging rather than repellent. After all,
who can be against legible writing on the blackboard? To be sure, I
myself wouldn't have assigned it a value of more than half the grade
on a final examination; perhaps, had it been in my charge to foster,
I would simply have required it as a tool of the trade without bestowing
upon it any special credit at all. And it did occur to me that what
the students drew in their examination books might not be an accurate
measure of their skill in drawing the same things on a blackboard, an
unusually intractable medium, but the motive seemed good. And
as for pretty girls in cunning outfits, what could be more cheering?
It seemed to me that those teacher-trainers must be amiable and playful
folk with well-developed aesthetic sensibilities and a penchant for
drama, in bold contrast to the rest of us who taught what you call "subjects,"
dour and narrow people reciting lectures and devising "thought"
questions. And who knows? Could it be that I would now actually remember
the political consequences of Henry's sad pilgrimage to Canossa if only
my history professor had put on sackcloth and lectured on his knees?

And I began to watch the teacher-trainers
in idle moments, in my idle moments, that is, not theirs. They
were rarely idle. They were busy rumbling down the hall pushing metal
carts laden with projectors and loudspeakers, which they actually knew
how to hook up and operate. I could hear them in the next classroom
shoving the desks into sociable circles so that, as in King Arthur's
court, no one would be disadvantaged by having to sit below the salt,
or breaking up into small groups, so that understanding could be reached
by democratic consensus rather than imposed by authority. Sometimes
whole classes could be heard singing--a delightful change of atmosphere
in precincts otherwise darkened by realism and naturalism and the intellectual
despair of eminent Victorians.

All in all, I thought the teacher-trainers
harmless and childlike, optimistic and ingenuous. I knew, to be sure,
that many of them held what they called doctorates in things like comparative
storage systems for badminton supplies and for cafeteria management,
but so what? They weren't pretending to teach anything that called for
traditional training in scholarship, were they? Doctorates in education,
I remembered from my days in graduate school, are much easier to get
than any other kind, but what did that matter? A doctorate, after all
was just a union card, a ticket of admission to a remarkably good life,
and why shouldn't those decent and well-meaning people have doctorates
just like everybody else? As to whether what they did had any value
in the training of teachers, I just didn't know. I wasn't curious enough
to pay thoughtful attention, and they didn't seem to be hurting anyone.
Live and let live.

So I did. Once the novelty of their techniques
wore off, and long before it dawned on me that those techniques were
better called "antics," I just stopped thinking about them.
The teacher-trainers were not in my mind at all when I started to publish
The Underground Grammarian in 1976. The Bicentennial Year was
in my mind, and Tom Paine and even William Lloyd Garrison, and, most
of all, the ghastly, fractured, ignorant English that is routinely written
and spread around by college administrators, the people charged with
the making and executing of policy in the cause of higher education
in America. I presumed that those administrators would be the natural
prey of a journal devoted to the display of ignorance in unlikely places.
It never even struck me then that most administrators were once the
teacher-trainers who were not in my mind.

And I will beg your indulgence, reader,
in suggesting that when you look at the world and wonder what's going
on, the teacher-trainers are not in your mind. Nuclear weapons
and taxes are in your mind, along with politicians and other criminals.
Pollution and racial discord are in your mind. Prices double and pleasures
dwindle, violence and ignorance multiply and expectations diminish,
and all the season's new television shows are aimed at demented children,
and master sergeants have to puzzle out in comic-book style manuals
how to pull the triggers on their Titan missiles, and sometimes, in
a moment of pure panic, you wonder whether you shouldn't have voted
for Goldwater after all. And when you wave a finger this way and that,
trying to point it at someone, anyone, the teacher-trainers are not
in your mind.

Sometimes, to be sure, you do suspect
and even indict "the schools." Ah, if only "the schools"
would do this or that. But what? Everybody has a formula, sort of. Money,
obviously, isn't the answer. They have money beyond counting. Less money
can hardly be the answer--just ask the National Education Association.
So what are we to do? Public schools? Private schools? Vouchers? Integration?
Remediation? Consolidation? Back to basics? Forward to relevancy in
bold innovative thrusts?

Then again, you may not even ask these
questions, for to do so is to see a connection that not many Americans
have thought to make. Millions of us have nothing at all to do with
the schools. We have no children in the schools, and we don't know what
they're doing, and we don't much care, except about the taxes we pay
to support the enterprise. We can easily think of many things that must
be far more important than education, a notably dreary topic in any
case. Surely politics is more important than education. So is economics.
Technology. National defense. Even art! And the six o'clock news in
any city in the land makes it perfectly clear that the most important
things that happened in your part of the world today were murders, rapes,
and a fire of unknown origin in an abandoned warehouse. And as for the
schools, most of us just hope that they'll teach the children to read
and write and cipher someday soon and just not bother us. We have all
those important things to worry about and we really can't be bothered
with wondering about whether the schools should experiment with a groundbreaking
return to the self-contained classroom.

In fact, the destiny of this land, of
any land, is exactly and inevitably determined by the nature and abilities
of the children now in school. The future simply has no other resources.
And, an even more dismaying fact, because it tells of us, not
them, this land as it is today is the exact and inevitable result of
the nature and abilities of the schoolchildren that we were.
And the things that you think important, everything from the politics
to the rapes and murders and fires, are what they are and have for us
the meanings that they have precisely because of what we were.

Public education, because it is so nearly
universal and because, notwithstanding minor variations, it is a monolithic
and self-sustaining institution, has more power to create our national
character than anything else in America. While it does not bring us
oil shortages or volcanic eruptions, it does determine what we will
think and do about such things. It determines what we will feel and
how we will do the work of the mind. This should not be surprising.
You, and you alone, could do as much if you could somehow manage to
influence almost every American child day after day for about twelve
years, although, as an individual controlling consciousness, you would
probably do a better job in many respects. There is, of course, no individual
controlling consciousness in the institution of education--no villain
need be--but the institution, like any institution, has a kind of mind
and will of its own. It changes, if at all, only very slowly, and, since
you don't find it as important as politics or fire, it changes
only at the will of those relatively few people who actually do find
it important, because they live by it. Nor is it their will--and why
should it be ?--to make any change that is not in their self-interest.
"They," of course are a loosely confederated host of administrators,
bureaucrats, consultants, professors, researchers, and Heaven only knows
how many other titled functionaries. They are a very diverse group,
but they have, with astonishingly rare exceptions, one thing in common.
They have all been through the process that we call teacher-training,
and most of them have done some of that themselves. They are the people
who are not in your mind when you wonder what the hell is happening
to us.

And they would never have gotten back
into my mind had I not undertaken, for what I now think frivolous reasons,
what turned out to be a serious and infuriating study of the use of
language, a study that had to lead to a consideration of the meaning
of the use of language. That study is, of course, the business of The
Underground Grammarian, which has been accurately enough described
as a journal of radical, academic terrorism. It is radical because it
seeks in language the root of the thoughtlessness that more and more
seems to characterize our culture. It is academic both because the tenor
of the study to which it subjects the work of its victims is scholastic
and because it finds the most egregious examples of mindless and mendacious
babble neither in the corporation nor in the Congress but in the schools.
It is terrorist because it exploits the fear that many academics feel
when they know that their words might appear in print before the eyes
of the public, mere civilians who are not members of the education club.

Here is the brief statement of editorial
policies that appeared in the first issue of The Underground Grammarian:

Editorial Policies

The Underground Grammarian
is an unauthorized journal devoted to the protection of the Mother
Tongue at Glassboro State College. Our language can be written
and even spoken correctly, even beautifully. We do not demand beauty,
but bad English cannot be excused or tolerated in a college. The
Underground Grammarian will expose and ridicule examples of jargon,
faulty syntax, redundancy, needless neologism, and any other kind
of outrage against English.

Clear language engenders clear thought,
and clear thought is the most important benefit of education. We are
neither peddlers nor politicians that we should prosper by that use
of language which carries the least meaning. We cannot honorably accept
the wages, confidence, or licensure of the citizens who employ us as
we darken counsel by words without understanding.

My first motives were just about what
you would expect from an English teacher: a supposed reverence for that
"Mother Tongue," the noble and ancient language of Shakespeare
and Milton and
all the others; the notion that the judicious choice of a semicolon
was a nice display of what Veblen
called "the instinct of workmanship," a good thing; and especially
that sense of smug satisfaction that comes from knowing exactly why
to use the word "nice" when making a nice display. There was
also the natural, and perfectly justifiable, contempt that any front-line
teacher feels for administrators. So many of them seem to be born aluminum-siding
salesmen who took a wrong turn somewhere along the line. Nor is that
contempt mitigated by the fact that many of them (but by no means all)
were once front-line teachers themselves. On the contrary, that reveals
what they really think of teaching: a humble and tedious calling useful
only as a necessary step to a better life and better pay. There is furthermore,
in almost every teacher, a small, dark current of fascism, and the work
of administration not only permits but actually encourages it.

I did say, to be sure, that "clear
language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important
benefit of education," but that was little more than a recitation.
That's what we're expected to say in this business, and we keep saying
it and nodding, saying it and nodding. And, like most of the things
that people are expected to say, it's true in a way, and false in a
way, and not well thought out. There is an important principle to be
drawn here: Many of our supposed "ideas" are in fact recitations,
recitations not of what we think or understand but of what we simply
believe that we believe. Thinking is done in language, and understanding,
a result of thinking, is expressed in language, but, when we simply
adopt and recite what has been expressed, we have committed neither
thinking nor understanding. When the first issue of The Underground
Grammarian appeared, I had neither thought about nor understood
that lofty proposition about clear language and. clear thought. But
the words were there on the page, and they demanded attention.

All that talk about the ability to write
letters of application for jobs is bunk; here is the real value of teaching
everybody, everybody, to write clear, coherent, and more or less
conventional prose: The words we write demand far more attention than
those we speak. The habit of writing exposes us to that demand, and
skill in writing makes us able to pay logical and thoughtful attention.
Having done that, we can come to understand what before we could only
recite. We may find it bunk or wisdom, but, while we had better reject
the bunk, we can accept the wisdom as truly our own rather than some
random suggestion of popular belief. If we have neither the habit nor
the skill of writing, however, we have to guess which is the bunk and
which the wisdom, and we will almost invariably guess according to something
we feel, not according to something to which we have given thoughtful
attention.

I had not, in fact, given thoughtful attention
to "clear thought" and "clear language" and the
ways in which they might relate to each other, but I had at least taken
hold of one end of what turned out to be a long and tangled string.
An examination, if only of comma faults and dangling participles, had
begun. Examination has a life of its own. You simply cannot think about
commas and the place of modifiers without finding that you are thinking
about thinking. It is impossible to examine language at any level without
examining the work of a mind. I knew that Wittgenstein had said that
all philosophy was the examination of language, but I assumed, because
I wasn't paying thoughtful attention, that he was referring to the obvious
fact that philosophy was about ideas, and that ideas could be read only
in language. I don't think that anymore. I'm convinced that he was talking
about language as language, with its commas and modifiers, and
especially about writing, a special case of language, permanently accessible.

Consider, for example, the following sentence,
which was quoted without comment in a much later issue:

Teratology

During the 1980-81 school year, the
project will provide teachers and administrators with education and
support designed to optimize the behaviors and conditions in the school
which support student learning to the extent that at least two thirds
of the teachers receiving training and support in Expectations will
report, on a specifically designed survey, changes in at least two
school related operational characteristics that have been identified
as critical elements of the network of expectations that support learning.

What we learn from studying that sentence
has very little to do with the digest of rules in the back of the composition
handbook. It has to do with the nature of a mind and the way it does
its work. That is revealing enough, but it's only the beginning. The
mind we see at work in that sentence is not the mind of an isolated
eccentric. That writer is a member, and probably in all too good standing,
of a community of minds and the inheritor of a massive tradition. It
represents what is obviously acceptable to a society of like-minded
peers and superiors and subordinates. It speaks, one might say, for
the mind of a vast bureaucracy, and, furthermore, since no mind
works that way naturally, it must have learned that trick.

When we study that sentence, therefore,
we study the intellectual climate of the society in which such work
of the mind is not only acceptable but desirable, and we study the traditions
and practices that must have formed both the society and the individual
mind. That example is in no way extraordinary or even unusual; it is,
in fact, typical. (You will know that, of course, if you have any acquaintance
with the business of the schools, and, if you haven't, you'll soon see
for yourself.) So we can ask: What is the intellectual climate
of that society? What traditions and practices have formed that climate?
Having answers to those questions, we can ask: Why is a society so endowed
and so constituted given the task of teaching minds to work well, and
how likely is it to succeed in that work?

In speaking of that "society"
in such general terms, I have to advise civilians that I do not mean
"the teachers," or at least not simply the teachers. Most
people think that teachers are the agents of public education
and that all those guidance counselors and curriculum facilitators and
others are merely support services. This is not so. Of all the agents
of our system of public education, the teachers are by far the least
influential, and what they actually accomplish or don't accomplish in
their classrooms has very little to do with the worth of "education"
in the large sense. This is not to say that teachers are uninfluenced
by the intellectual climate of the system as a whole, far from it, but
only that they are the lowliest foot-sloggers in a vast army. Some of
them will rise from the ranks and will be no longer teachers. They will
become the people whose minds work like the mind of that writer just
cited. Indeed, if their minds work that way, they are all the more likely
to rise. But as long as they remain teachers they are, and they're so
treated as, mere employees, who may or may not be seeking admittance
to the seats of power.

Incipient schoolteachers--I have known
hundreds of them--are generally decent young people of average intelligence.
Some are stupid, of course, and some rarer few are brilliant. Almost
all of them seem a bit more than ordinarily ethical, and I can't believe
that any one of them ever decided to be a teacher for the sake of doing
harm. Furthermore, the task of teaching a mind to work well is not a
particularly difficult one. Teachers do not have to be brilliant, although
they probably shouldn't be stupid. In short, almost all of those who
seek to be teachers are quite capable of being good teachers, but something
happens to them on the way to the classroom. They fall into bad company.
Here is an example of what they must face:

Pontiffs and Peasants

Unlike
socialism, the realm of educationism was never meant to be a classless
society. Just now it's an emasculated feudalism whose few surviving
pugnantes have decided to settle down with the unholy but happy
Saracens, leaving the miserable laborantes to fend for themselves
under the silly governance of the puffed-up orantes. The go-getter,
self-promoting grant-grabbers have all wangled themselves cushy consultancies
and juicy jobs in government. The wretched tillers of the soil are hoeing
hard rows in the public schools and risking life and limb in the cause
of minimum competence. The jargon-besotted clergy are bestowing upon
each other rich benefices of experiential continua and peddling cheap
remediational indulgences, fighting to keep their teacher-training academies
growing in an age of closing schools and dwindling faith in bold innovative
thrusts in non-cognitive curriculum design facilitation. Fat flocks,
fat shepherds. Things do look bad, but let us not despair. The Black
Death has been reported in Arizona, and it may yet spread.

It's not always easy to tell the pontiffs
from the peasants. The sumptuary laws no longer apply. In the time of
love-beads, both classes wear love-beads; in the time of Levi's, Levi's.
Our best clue--always the best clue when we want to assess the
work of the mind--is the language used by each class, Lumpensprache
by the peasants and Pfaffesprache, a classier lingo indeed, by
the pontiffs.

Here's a typical passage of the latter
as it appeared, unfortunately without attribution, in an otherwise splendid
column by Howard Hurwitz, a syndicated writer on education:

These instructional approaches are perhaps
best conceived on a systems model, where instructional variables (input
factors) are mediated by factors of students' existing cognitive structure
(organizational properties of the learner's immediately relevant concepts
in the particular subject field); and by personal predispositions
and tolerance toward the requirements of inference, abstraction, and
impulse control, all prerequisite to achievement in the discovery
or the hypothetical learning mode.

So. It may mean that what a student learns
depends on what he already knows and on whether or not he gives a damn.
For a pontiff of educationism, that's already a novel and arresting
idea, but if he said it in plain English he wouldn't be allowed to teach
any courses in it. Indeed, if he could say it in plain English
he would probably have enough sense not to say it, thus disclosing to
the world that years of study have brought him at last to a firm grasp
on the obvious.

Even when intoning the obvious, however,
a pontiff keeps his head down. Did you notice that "perhaps"?
He doesn't actually commit himself to the proposition that approaches
are best conceived as a model where variables are mediated by factors;
he is willing only to opine that approaches are "perhaps"
best conceived as a model where variables are mediated by factors. If
that were humility rather than self-defense, it would suit him well,
for he seems to think that "conceived" means "understood"
and that "mediated" means "mitigated" and that "factors"
and "variables" can mean anything at all. He's not so good
with semicolons either.

That point is important. Although inflated
with fake erudition, Pfaffesprache always reveals, inadvertently,
its roots in the vulgar, but usually honest, Lumpensprache. Thus
we find in that passage the defensive errors of the ignorant, who always
use too many modifiers and achieve thereby either redundancy or incoherence.
There is no need to specify that a student's "disposition"
is "personal" or to elaborate "subject" into "the
particular subject field." We are not enlightened by hearing that
a property is organizational or that the relevant is immediately relevant.
"The hypothetical learning mode" tells us only that this pontiff
is hazy about the meanings of "mode" and "hypothetical"
and short on "learning."

The pontiff, of course, preaches what
he practices in some teacher-training academy. Nevertheless, in spite
of his baleful influence, many of his students do not adopt his ignorant
babble. They cling faithfully to their own ignorant babble.

They become schoolteachers and compose
"thought" questions for study guides: "What did the sculpture
told the archologists?" They admonish parents: "Scott is dropping
in his studies he acts as if don't care. Scott want pass in his assignment
it all, he had a poem to learn and he fell to do it." When asked
to demonstrate their own literacy, they go out on strike, demanding
on the placards "quality educacion" and "descent wages."

Maybe you can't fool all of the
people all of the time, but the pontiffs can fool all of the peasants
forever. That accounts for the fact that the society of educationism
is made up of two apparently dissimilar classes. Deep down where it
really counts, they're equally less than minimally competent.

We can understand why the educationists
defend so truculently that bizarre article of their faith which pronounces
superior intelligence and academic accomplishment traits not suitable
to schoolteachers. Well, they may have a good point there. There's more
than enough violence in the schools already. If we were to send a bunch
of bright and able students to study with the hypothetical learning
mode pontiff, they'd ride him out of town on a rail and hurry back to
burn down the whole damn teacher-training academy.

It seems, at first, a puzzling fact that
those who have spent as much as one half of their time in college studying
under professors who fancy that they conceive their instructional approaches
on systems models mediated by factors can then go out into the world
unable to compose complete sentences or even to spell "education."
However, not until quite recently, and then only in response to external
demands, have the teacher-trainers thought it their responsibility to
see to it that newly graduated teachers could in fact write complete
sentences and spell correctly. (We will see later some entertaining
examples of what they do in response to those demands.) Those
things were the business of the English department people, and if they
failed to teach them, well, too bad, the fledgling teachers would just
have to do without them.

Furthermore, the students in teacher-training
academies are not in fact expected to adopt or even to examine the language
of that "mediated by factors" passage. That is the language
of the education textbooks, not the language of the classroom, although
in education courses whole classes are not infrequently devoted to the
reading of some text, as mealtime in monasteries is devoted to Scripture.
Should a student ask, for instance, the meaning of the passage
cited, he would probably be told something very much like the suggested
translation. Should he ask, however, why such an obvious generalization
had to be couched in such strange language, I don't know what answer
he would get, but I would bet that he will soon want to reconsider his
choice of a calling. Should he take the last step and ask why anyone
would think such a banal truism worthy of serious study, then he probably
won't have to reconsider his choice of a calling. His adviser will do
that for him.

The passage is only a ritual recitation
which is not supposed to be subjected to thoughtful scrutiny. It is
a formulized pastiche of acceptable jargon terms and stock phrases.
While it has, for the inattentive, a formidable sound, it is the kind
of writing that is surprisingly easy to compose for anyone who is familiar
with all of its traditional devices. (The craft of making such prose,
strangely enough, is similar to what we can find to this day in the
extemporaneous epic recitations of mendicant storytellers in the marketplaces
of the Near East. They remember and stitch together thousands of recurring
epithets, stock descriptions of the hero, his horse, his armor, standardized
metaphors and narrative devices. Educationistic prose, however, is usually
less stirring than the recitations of clever beggars.) And who, in any
case, would want to scrutinize such a passage? Who? A more than
ordinarily inquisitive (and perhaps skeptical) student, that's who.
One who might indeed be able to compose a complete sentence and even
spell "education."

Even in teacher-training academics, there
are such students. They usually learn to keep their mouths shut, but
those who don't can be a nuisance. They are not only disconcerting in
class, but they are likely to give the place a bad name by complaining
in public that their education courses seem silly. (Most schoolteachers--go
and ask some--will shrug off their education courses as a kind of necessary
evil, a "waste of time." Those courses, however, are a "waste
of time" only for the students enrolled in them; for the institution
of teacher-training they are immensely profitable.) That is why the
pontiffs feel most comfortable when they can in fact preach to peasants,
which is one of the reasons (there are others) for that "bizarre
article of faith."

The ordinary civilian, who may very well
remember with awe the apparent erudition of some teacher or other, is
not generally aware of this strange doctrine, but there is little enthusiasm
in the teacher-training business for outstanding intellectual accomplishment
in would-be teachers. One claimed theory is that since a teacher must
be able to "relate" to the students before any learning can
happen, the teacher ought to be as much like the student as possible,
very unlikely in the case of an especially intellectual teacher. The
democratizing leaven of ignorance, therefore, may be in fact desirable
in a teacher. It is also a supposition of educationistic folklore that
intellectuals are likely to be more interested in the subjects they
teach than in their students, which will make them cold and distant,
perhaps even authoritarian. The latter, at least, is hard to quarrel
with, for the pronouncements of one who can in fact speak with authority
on some subject are by definition "authoritarian." They are
also, however, exactly the pronouncements any thoughtful person would
want to hear if he sought knowledge. This doctrine would seem to suggest
that if you feel the need of a diet it would be better to consult with
a hairdresser than with a physician, for the hairdresser is much easier
to relate to than the frosty physician, whose advice, furthermore, would
surely be authoritarian.

The tangled evolution of this strange
tenet, which is not at all the same as the contention that it doesn't
require more than ordinary intelligence to teach children the work of
the mind, will be considered in later chapters. For now, though, we
have to consider the problem that it causes for those who hold it. One
part of that problem is invisible to the believers: How can we at once
denigrate the authoritarianism of the intellectual while adopting in
our own pronouncements the tone, if not the substance, of authoritative
intellectualism? While that question does not trouble the teacher-trainers,
who are simply unmindful of it, it must bother us, eventually. That
part of the problem visible to them, probably because it is a
matter of clear self-interest, is this: If intellectualism is undesirable,
its opposite must be desirable; but the opposite of intellectualism,
by whatever name, is hard to champion in a supposedly academic context.
It would take a bold professor indeed to come out in favor of ignorance
and stupidity and offer in their favor arguments based on knowledge
and reason, arguments of the sort that are still expected in some of
our colleges and universities. It requires only a presumptuous professor
to plump for ignorance and stupidity on other grounds, and this is not
unheard of, especially in enthusiasts of drugs and pop pseudo-religions.
For the institution of teacher-training as a whole, however, something
more publicly defensible is needed, and, since the defense can afford
neither kookiness nor the appeal to knowledge and reason, it must rest
upon what is likely to prove emotionally acceptable to the largest possible
audience.

And there is such a defense. Over and
against the overweening demands of scholarly intellectualism, the teacher-trainers
have set the presumably unquestionable virtues of what they call "humanism."
They use this term in so many different contexts and to characterize
so many different kinds of acts and ideologies that I will not attempt
to discuss it fully here. It will just have to grow on you. It does
not, as you might think, denote as usual a particular school of thought
or slant of philosophical or religious speculation connected especially
but not exclusively with the Renaissance, although many who use the
term have heard of the Renaissance. This is something closer
to "humaneness," as that word is used by what used to be called
the "Humane Society," an organization that publicly deplored
the cruel treatment of horses. One of the aims of "humanistic"
educationism is to deplore the cruel treatment of children subjected
to the overbearing demands of knowledge, scholarship, and logic by the
traditional powers of authoritarian intellectualism.

We will return to that strange "humanism,"
for it is one of the two fundamental principles that can be said to
make up the underlying theory of education in America. The other is
what might be called the iron law of behavior modification. Like Free
Will and The Omniscience of God, educationistic humanism and behavior
modification are ultimately irreconcilable, and their collisions are
at the heart of our educational disorders. The theologians, at least,
are not unaware of their stubborn little problem, but the educationists
seem oblivious to the contradictions inherent in their two favorite
principles. Nor could they abandon either, for in their "humanism"
they can pose as philosophers and priests, and as modifiers of behavior
they can claim to be scientists and healers. We can consider their claims
by looking first at the roots of the presumed science of educationism.

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